“You just go from day to day; you wake up and you’re still here.” This is how Janet Irving describes the view from 100.

This resident of Manchester-by-the Sea enjoys remarkable vitality, highlighted by the gifts of good hearing and eyesight. On a hot summer day she graciously received this visitor and regaled me with good humor and rich memories.

“I just keep on going,” she adds about her current life. If she has a secret formula, it’s probably this: “You must keep on working at something that interests you; otherwise you become dull.”

No one would ever accuse Janet Irving of being dull. She sparkles with feisty and sometimes acerbic wit as she talks about her career and the fascinating people in her long life.

Among these people, Mary Garden looms large. In the first half of the 20th century, to those who knew anything about opera , hers was a household name. After her debut in 1900 at the Opéra-Comique, this Scottish-American soprano enjoyed a smashing career, and had the distinction of pioneering roles in Charpentier’s Louise and Debussey’s  Pelleas et Melisande.

Janet Irving became a close friend of this diva, after first meeting her in 1937. She even sang for Mary Garden, a woman who could be intimidating in her bluntness. After hearing Janet perform, Mary told her: “I hate that song; you need more work.”

Thanks to Janet Irving, this interviewer had the pleasure of handling the rhinestone bracelet that Mary Garden wore when she performed Tosca. For a confirmed opera fan like me, it was stirring to touch a famous diva’s jewelry. Her friend Janet plans to give it to a charitable group hoping this piece of memorabilia will fetch a good price.

After considerable voice training in France and Italy, Janet Irving had the opportunity for a career as a singer but opted instead to join her husband, James Irving, in South Africa. She then decided to become a teacher of singing instead of a performer. This teaching career she continued for 40 years, most of it at the Longy School in Cambridge where she is legend.

Born in New York City on June 22, 1902, Janet Irving takes no great pleasure in having people know her current age. “I wouldn’t mind being 99 or 101,” she says. She did, however, much enjoy the party given her by friends to celebrate her most recent birthday.

Asked if other members of her family were long-lived, she cites her great-aunt Sarah Curtis Hepburn who lived to 101. She once inquired of this venerable relative if she had ever seen President Lincoln. Her aunt’s disappointing answer: “I was never allowed to walk alone in the streets of Washington.”

That memory prompted my asking what Janet Irving remembered of World War I. “We were too far away,” she responded. “It was something that happened way over there; it was something very remote.”

World War II was another story, however. She spent most of it in Capetown, South Africa where she had gone to be with her husband. The latter was a physician and a professor of physiology who taught in South Africa until 1960. But getting to that country in 1939 involved for Janet an interminable  zigzag voyage on a ship fearful of encountering the German battleship Graf Spee.

Turning back to of her childhood memories, Mrs. Irving  recalls  the unconventional debut she made at the Metropolitan Opera at age eight “when I screamed the place down.” It was a performance of Hansel and Gretel which she and five of her friends viewed from a box given by the manager to her father. When the witch was being put in the oven, Janet was horrified and screamed “You can’t burn the witch!” Thereupon an usher came to the box and “lifted me out to the corridor, where you could still hear me screaming.”

Mrs. Irving has many other anecdotes about opera and its often temperamental stars. About my boyhood favorite tenor, Jussi Bjoerling, she recalls his visit to South Africa and his fondness for parties there. She loved hearing the pair of Wagnerian singers, Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior, at the Met and recalls the former’s advice about how best to handle long demanding Wagnerian roles: “Buy a comfortable pair of shoes!”

But music has provided Janet Irving with much more than entertaining anecdotes.  “I’m lucky to have music,” she says. “It’s something you give out to people; it doesn’t pull you in.”  

No one has a surefire formula for living to 100. Although good genes and wise lifestyle habits can prove invaluable, much depends on luck. The philosophy expressed by Janet Irving, however, would seem to serve longevity well.

The passion she feels for what she loves evidently impels her forward. From all appearances, she relishes the persons, places, and things that have loomed large in her life and seems to find in them abundant reasons for continuing to cherish the world.

Richard Griffin